Leonardo and the Last Supper (18 page)

Lodovico Sforza was suffering his own misfortunes as Charles and his army entered the Apennine passes on their dangerous journey homeward. The summer had begun hopefully for Lodovico after he compacted the Holy League in the spring. He still appeared to be the man who (as the insignia on his harnesses boasted) held the fate of the world in his hands. On 26 May, a huge celebration was staged for him in Milan. Mass was celebrated in the cathedral, after which he emerged through its doors to appear beneath a crimson awning embroidered with mulberry leaves—one of his personal symbols—and raised for the occasion on the piazza outside. After more than a dozen years of plotting and maneuvering, the day had finally arrived for Lodovico to receive his official sanction from the Holy Roman emperor as the duke of Milan.

Lodovico’s diploma from the emperor had arrived, conveniently and
perhaps not entirely coincidentally, a few days after the Holy League was signed. Now, in Milan, Lodovico staged a magnificent ceremony for himself. A German bishop and Maximilian’s chancellor took turns reading out the imperial privileges granted by their master, after which they conferred on Lodovico the ducal cap and mantle, and placed into his hands a scepter and the sword of state. Lodovico then moved in procession with his duchess, Beatrice, to the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio to give thanks for his accession to the ducal throne. Beatrice, who had recently given birth to their second son, Francesco, described the occasion to her sister as “the grandest spectacle and noblest solemnity that our eyes have ever beheld.”
²³
Following the ceremony in Sant’Ambrogio, she and Lodovico returned to the Castello for a punishing round of feasting.

Leonardo was probably involved in these celebrations. At Lodovico’s court he was “the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.”
²⁴
In 1490 he had enjoyed a great triumph with his elaborate stage set for a pageant,
The Feast of Paradise
, produced by Lodovico in honor of the wedding of his nephew Giangaleazzo to Isabella. Leonardo was selected for such projects not only for his dedication to “beauty and elegance” but also for his talent for achieving spectacular and surprising visual effects through virtuoso engineering. “His genius for invention was astounding,” marveled one writer.
²⁵
No plans or drawings for
The Feast of Paradise
survive, but an eyewitness described how Leonardo designed a complex scenography depicting Paradise in the form of an elevated golden orb surrounded by seven planets, the twelve signs of the zodiac, and “a great number of lights representing stars.” At the climax of the performance, the planets descended—evidently by means of some sort of high-wire trickery—to present Isabella with the play’s libretto.
²⁶

Leonardo must have worked on many such productions if Beatrice’s secretary was correct in his claim that new spectacles were staged every month at Lodovico’s court.
²⁷
One year after
The Feast of Paradise
, Leonardo assisted in the decoration of the ballroom in the Castello for Lodovico’s own nuptials, and in designing the “wild man” costumes for actors—the men whose purses young Salai stole—participating in an accompanying festival. Leonardo enjoyed creating spectacles that shocked, especially through the presentation of darker themes. For one pageant he engineered an intricate mechanism by which the side of a mountain swung open to reveal Pluto and his demonic minions frolicking in their fearsome underworld. “When Pluto’s paradise is
opened,” reads one of his notes, “then there will be devils, who play on pots to make infernal noises. Here will be death, the furies, Cerberus, many cherubs who weep. Here fires will be made of various colours.”
²⁸

Leonardo’s interest in the monstrous and the incendiary was evident from a young age. One of his earliest artistic productions, according to legend, was a wooden buckler—a small shield—given to him by his father to decorate for a local peasant. Young Leonardo assembled in his bedroom “a fearsome and horrible monster” composed of dead lizards, snakes, crickets, locusts, and bats. As this heap of scales and wings rotted and stank, he meticulously painted his monster on the shield, showing it emerging from a cave and shooting smoke from its nostrils and fire from its eyes. When he was finished, he darkened his room and summoned his father. At first terrified by the sight of the ferocious monster, Ser Piero ultimately found the creation “indescribably marvellous and he was loud in his praise of Leonardo’s ingenuity.”
²⁹

Leonardo is known, of course, for the “beauty and elegance” of his work. “Leonardo is the one artist,” swooned the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, “about whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty.”
³⁰
Yet Leonardo also dwelt on the fantastical and the grotesque, on what might be called infernal beauty. At times he even seems to have believed such things were more powerful and seductive than beauty, science, and reason.

This compulsion for the mysterious and infernal appears in one of his earliest known writings, an intriguing passage composed sometime in the late 1470s. The story he related was probably based on a personal experience of wandering the hills near Vinci, but it quickly takes on symbolic dimensions. He began with a description of how, filled with “eager desire,” he explored a terrain of “gloomy rocks” in search of “various and strange shapes” in the landscape. Before long he came to the mouth of a great cavern, before which he stood astonished. He then had a decision to make. “Bending my back into an arch,” he wrote, “I rested my left hand on my knee and held my right hand over my down-cast and contracted eye brows: often bending first one way and then the other, to see whether I could discover anything inside, and this being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having remained there some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvellous thing within it.”
³¹

The bottom of the page is reached, but the story—what could be called “The Cave of Fear and Desire”—apparently continued. Leonardo inscribed at the foot of the page the symbol, a loop shaped like the number 6, that he employed to indicate that a passage continued overleaf or on another page. However, the back of the sheet merely deals with scientific problems. The conclusion of the story has never been found, leaving us ignorant of whether his desire overcame his fear, and of what marvelous things he might have glimpsed in the dark and rocky deeps of the grotto.

The allure of fear and danger is explored in one of Leonardo’s other writings, composed in the late 1480s.
³²
Written in the form of a letter to a friend named Benedetto, it gives a long account of a population terrorized by a giant: a creature with a “black visage,” “swollen and bloodshot eyes,” and a nose “turned up in a snout with wide nostrils” from which thick bristles protrude. Leonardo speaks as a survivor of the horrific tragedy in which this “raging fiend,” to whom every desperate human onslaught “was as nothing,” cut a deadly swath through his helpless Lilliputian attackers. He stresses the vanity and uselessness of human defenses: rational efforts at protection prove hopeless against the malevolent terrors of the frenzied giant. “O wretched folk,” he wrote, “for you there avail not the impregnable fortresses, nor the lofty walls of your cities, nor the being together in great numbers, nor your houses or palaces!”

The moral of the story seems to be the futility of keeping chaos and catastrophe at bay through the kind of engineering in which—ironically—Leonardo himself specialized. No human ingenuity, he stressed, could master the unstoppable energy of the giant. The only hope was to abandon civilization and escape to “tiny holes and subterranean caves.” Here the lucky few survivors, relinquishing their humanity, would live “after the manner of crabs and crickets.”

This story may have been the outline for one of Lodovico’s masques or pageants, or else simply an amusing literary exercise to read aloud to Milanese courtiers or close friends. Leonardo made clear, however, that his story was a tragedy: mothers and fathers are deprived of their children, women of their companions, and never “since the world was created” has such weeping and lamentation been heard. He concluded on a disturbing personal note that sends the story veering into an even darker realm. The narrator, it turns out, has not escaped or survived after all. “I do not know what to say or do,” Leonardo wrote, “for everywhere I seem to find myself swimming
head down within the mighty throat and remaining disfigured in death, buried within the huge belly.”

“The Cave of Fear and Desire” reappears here as the mouth of the ravening giant into which Leonardo has peered too closely. He identifies so intensely with his fearsome monster that he imagines himself dead and disfigured inside its belly. Leonardo had become a victim of what Joseph Conrad called the “fascination of the abomination”: the hypnotic power of dangerous, mysterious, and destructive forces that operate beyond the reach of human knowledge.
³³
The fantastical and grotesque, in Leonardo’s story, have comprehensively trampled the rational and scientific.

Leonardo’s productions in Milan functioned, behind their stunning visual effects, as Sforza propaganda. The set for
The Feast of Paradise
, for example, had included none-too-subtle details such as portraits of Lodovico’s ancestors suspended in a frieze and entwined with garlands. Leonardo also involved himself in another branch of Sforza propaganda by designing emblems for Lodovico. All aristocratic families adopted heraldic symbols and then zealously applied them at every conceivable opportunity. For the Medici in Florence it was the
palle
, the crimson balls that were the principal components of their coat of arms. For the Visconti, it was a coiled serpent devouring a man, an image adopted by the Sforza when Francesco married into the family.

Individual members of aristocratic families took to adopting their own personal symbols or
imprese
: pictures of plants, animals, or objects—accompanied by a motto—that were meant to symbolize a person’s virtues. Lorenzo de’ Medici, in honor of his poetic pursuits and in a punning allusion to his forename, took the laurel tree. Lodovico likewise drew heraldic inspiration from his name. His middle name had originally been Maurus, but a childhood illness prompted his mother to invoke the protection of the Virgin by rechristening him Maria. Yet Lodovico’s eclipsed middle name lived on, forming the basis for endless puns, nicknames, and emblems. Maurus translates as both mulberry and Moor, and Lodovico exulted in both meanings. Mulberries and Moors were symbolically deployed in virtually all of his pageants. His wedding festivities in 1491 had featured a troop of twelve blacked-up Moors parading before a triumphal chariot
commanded by the figure of a Moor seated triumphantly on a globe. A consequence of Lodovico’s passion for such imagery was that slaves from Africa became fashionable at the Milanese court, with one chronicler claiming that all Lodovico’s courtiers kept a Moorish slave in their retinue.
³⁴

Leonardo seems not to have devised Moor imagery for Lodovico, but he did compose a sixteen-word literary exercise, a kind of intellectual doodling into which he managed to cram the word “moro” no fewer than five times: “
O moro, io moro se con tua moralità non mi amori tanto il vivere m’è amaro
” (O Moro, I shall die if with your goodness you will not love me, so bitter will my existence be).
³⁵
Leonardo enjoyed this sort of wordplay, which he often combined with riddle-like drawings. While at Lodovico’s court he drew a series of pictographs, or images that worked as rebuses, or clever visual puns.
³⁶
Puns of this sort discreetly featured in some of his paintings, as for example in his portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, where a juniper (
ginepro
) stands in the background as a visual play on the young woman’s first name.

There seems to have been an entire industry designing emblems and slogans in Milan, and in the spring of 1495 Lodovico undoubtedly took more than his usual interest in heraldry. For, having been officially invested by Maximilian with the dukedom, he was at last able to add the imperial eagles to his coat of arms. Moreover, he wanted his new coat of arms to appear above Leonardo’s painting in Santa Maria delle Grazie. The convent was already in the process of being covered with Sforza insignia, marking it out as an institution specially patronized by Lodovico. The exterior wall featured terra-cotta shields on which various of his devices, such as the Visconti vipers, were proudly displayed. Adorning the outside wall of the apse designed by Bramante was another Sforza emblem, a pair of hands wielding an axe to chop a log: a reference to Muzio Attendolo’s brief career as a woodcutter.